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They may not have transcripts, but some American colleges are taking Syrian “students” to supposedly educate them to return and re-build Syria (yeh, sure!).

From Omaha.com (hat tip: Julia). The ‘students’ featured here are at Emporia State University in Emporia, KS.

I haven’t heard much from Emporia since late 2007 and early 2008 when they had a huge Somali refugee problem there. The Somalis had been brought in by Tyson Foods and were busy developing a Somali enclave in town. Ultimately, the controversy got too heated and Tyson Foods actually closed the plant. We covered it so extensively that we created an entire category just for Emporia, here. BTW, it was the first time we came to understand the role of meatpackers working with refugee contractors to change small town America. But I digress…

Here is the news about Syrian ‘students’ being placed in US colleges:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Brothers Molham and Mohammad Kayali spray-painted anti-government graffiti around Aleppo University in northern Syria in early 2012 and held up flags in protest against President Bashar al Assad’s government. Worried that their lives were in danger, they gave up on school and fled to Turkey in September 2012.

They were reunited last year with their younger brother, Ebrahim, at Emporia State University, a small school in Kansas, joining among about 700 “academic refugees” now in the U.S. who either fled from the long-running violent conflict, attended universities that have closed or couldn’t safely travel to schools in dangerous areas.

[….]

The New York-based Institute of International Education has helped organize a consortium of mostly U.S. and Portuguese schools and has provided 158 scholarships and 89 emergency grants to Syrian students, according to Daniela Kaisth, a vice president with the institute. Similar efforts were made to help Iraqi students after the U.S.-led invasion.

The latest data shows that the number of Syrian students attending U.S. universities swelled from 424 students in 2009-10 to 693 students in 2013-14, according to the institute’s Open Doors Report on International Education Exchange, published in partnership with the U.S. Department of State.

Some of the schools in the consortium are Emporia State, the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Monmouth College in Illinois, and Tufts University in Massachusetts.

A Somali man was sentenced in a San Antonio courtroom Thursday to 15 years in federal prison for lying to get into the U.S., as well as a never-before-disclosed admission that he had helped a terrorist group.

Abdinassir Mohamud Ibrahim crossed the US border in 2007 at Hidalgo and was granted asylum (refugee status) and “resettled” in Emporia, KS.

Abdinassir Mohamud Ibrahim, 43, previously admitted that he lied his way into the country or left out damaging details — such as his relationship to two people who made international headlines because of their reported ties to terrorist groups.

But the FBI, Border Patrol, acting U.S. Attorney Richard Durbin and a national security official disclosed Thursday that Ibrahim secretly also pleaded guilty in July to sending e-mails in support of al-Shabab and providing money to a friend affiliated with that terrorist group. The charges were made public at his sentencing Thursday, but officials made no mention of his cooperation that led to them keeping the details secret for more than six months.

The affidavit said Ayrow was the former leader of al-Shabab and was killed in a U.S. airstrike in 2008. Aweys was affiliated with al-Shabab and al-Ittihad al-Islami, which the U.S. has placed on a list of specially designated global terrorist groups.

Now look at this!

Ibrahim was granted refugee status in the U.S. and resettled in Emporia, Kansas,after coming through Hidalgo in May 2007. But the status was granted based on fraudulent information, the affidavit said.

Emporia, KS connection

If you have been reading RRW since we began writing, you may remember that there was a huge problem with Somalis in Emporia, KS in 2007, most of whom had been lured there by jobs at Tyson Foods. Overnight it seemed Emporia was flooded with Somali refugees. If I recall correctly there wasn’t even a contracted resettlement office there.

There was such a public outcry that Tyson Foods actually shut the main part of the plant down and moved the Somalis elsewhere. We wrote about what was happening for months and created a special category, here, just for news from Emporia.

As a matter of fact, Bobbi Mlynar writing at the Emporia Gazette on November 28, 2007 told the citizens there about our refugee problem in Hagerstown, MD and pretty accurately described what was the origin of RRW.

So back to Abdinassir Mohamud Ibrahim—there really was a liar (a phony refugee) and prospective terror sympathizer living in Emporia at the time citizens there were agitated!

One more thing, Ibrahim did not come in the usual resettlement process, he entered the country illegally by crossing the border in Texas and asked for and received ASYLUM.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback has signed a law aimed at keeping the state’s courts or government agencies from basing decisions on Islamic or other foreign legal codes, and a national Muslim group’s spokesman said Friday that a court challenge is likely.

The new law, taking effect July 1, doesn’t specifically mention Shariah law, which broadly refers to codes within the Islamic legal system. Instead, it says courts, administrative agencies or state tribunals can’t base rulings on any foreign law or legal system that would not grant the parties the same rights guaranteed by state and U.S. constitutions.

“This bill should provide protection for Kansas citizens from the application of foreign laws,” said Stephen Gele, spokesman for the American Public Policy Alliance, a Michigan group promoting model legislation similar to the new Kansas law. “The bill does not read, in any way, to be discriminatory against any religion.”

But supporters have worried specifically about Shariah law being applied in Kansas court cases, and the alliance says on its website that it wants to protect Americans’ freedoms from “infiltration” by foreign laws and legal doctrines, “especially Islamic Shariah Law.”

[…..]

….laws similar to Kansas’ new statute have been enacted in Arizona, Louisiana and Tennessee.

Read it all! See CAIR go nuts.

Now get this! This is the same guy (Brownback) who as Chairman of a Senate immigration subcommittee pushed for the resettlement of Somali Bantu into the US (and lots of other refugees as well!). However, after initially saying ‘we will take some in Kansas,’ he changed his tune when rumblings from his state indicated that it was not something the average Kansan was open to—AND911 happened. Here is a short segment from a very detailed article from Thomas Allen at VDARE, written in 2003, about the now ten-year-old Brownback change of heart:

Anywhere but Kansas!

When it comes to mass immigration, Sam Brownback is not just another Senator. He played a key role in sabotaging Republican support for the 1996 Smith-Simpson bill, the last serious effort at immigration reduction. And when the State Department accepted the Somali Bantu, and discussions began about where they would go, he was chairman of the Senate immigration subcommittee.

State Department officials say Brownback had told both them and U.N. refugee chief Ruud Lubbers that he was “interested in resettling more refugees in Kansas.” State began exploring the feasibility of resettling the Bantu in Wichita, Kansas.

According to Chris Renner, Program Director of the Kansas Board of Education, the Senator was the catalyst of the resettlement plan and “to make a long story short, he … lent his support to the resettlement of this population in Kansas.”

But apparently Kansas did not like the resettlement proposal any more than Maine and Massachusetts do. And after 9/11, Brownback announced a change of heart.

Change of hearts are O.K. as long as everyone knows the history of what happened and the people involved in bringing the largest groups of Muslim immigrants to the US—anyone involved with refugee resettlement—apologizes for what they are and have done to the country. There would be no need for laws like this one if we weren’t importing the Islamic foot soldiers for groups like CAIR.

Flood of Somalis to Kansas anyway!

By the way, even if Brownback had a change of heart, he couldn’t stop the flood of Somalis to Kansas. Remember in 2007 we began writing many posts on the trouble in Emporia, KS as the town became flooded with Somali workers for Tysons Food (gee I wonder if Brownback was getting campaign donations from Tyson and other meatpackers looking for cheap and captive labor?). We created a whole category on the problems in Emporia, here.

Tyson Foods closed the Emporia operation and moved the Somalis to other meat packing towns. One was Shelbyville, TN, but some went to Garden City, KS where the somalification of Kansas is occurring at this very moment. LOL! It is Garden City where the Somalis want a special publicly-funded Muslim cemetery so they don’t need to be near infidels even in death. I mentioned the Garden City cemetery in my post yesterday on Muslims demanding cemeteries in Europe, here.

So, it’s all well and good if there is no Shariah law allowed in Kansas courts, but Shariah is creeping into Kansas anyway in the most unlikeliest of places—local government training sessions (again, see somalification of Kansas) on how to understand Somalis in order to “serve” them better and local government decisions about segregated cemeteries.

Update April 27th: At least some in the Kansas legislature are attempting to keep shariah law from creeping into Kansas, here.

In 2008 Emporia, Kansas put up a fight. So much of a fight that the Tyson Foods meat-packing operation closed down and moved the Somalis out. We created an entire category about the conflict in Emporia—it is here with 37 archived posts. Now we know from this article in the Garden City Telegram that they moved some of them (mostly young men) to Garden City, KS and put them to work at a processing plant there. [By the way, Tyson is working its magic in Tennessee as well, here].

By the tone of the article by reporter Shajia Ahmad (a Somali or Arab?) it seems that Garden City is going to experience the Somalification (my word!) of their city without even a whimper of protest.

Just read this article! There are clearly problems in Garden City—you can tell by the reporter’s choice of the word “challenge” instead of problem. It is typical verbiage and standard reporting from those too chicken to speak the truth for fear of being labeled racists!

In the last four or five years, Garden City has seen an influx of several hundred Burmese and Somali families that have moved from other areas of the country to live and work in southwest Kansas, like many other regions in the Midwest and High Plains, spurred primarily by jobs in the meat-packing industry.

Many in Kansas, especially, came to Finney County* to work at the Tyson Fresh Meats plant following the shuttering of Tyson’s Emporia-based beef-packing plant in early 2008, where many of the 1,500 laid-off workers were Somali refugees.

Social service agencies hired a Somali expert to tell the Kansans how to tip-toe around the Somalis cultural and religious practices so as best to “serve them.” The greatest challenge is language—heck they have only been here in America for 5-10 years how could anyone expect them to have learned English!

Weber, whose agency helped sponsor Farah’s visit to Garden City to educate and inform local social service representatives and other stakeholders on salient issues concerning the Somali residents, said the biggest challenge facing locals is the language barrier.

“To translate, and know medical terms and child development terms … we’re working on it, but it’s a huge challengefor us right now,” Weber said.

Ah, the “challenges:”

Farah said the dynamics of the community in the Minnesota metropolis differ greatly from Garden City. However, understanding many simple traditional and cultural practices and norms will help in bettering communication between the agencies trying to serve refugees and other Somali residents locally.

For example, many of those in attendance Tuesday from various community organizations said they are challenged with Somali clients not showing up or returning for health or medical-related appointments for either them or their children. [Readers, this means that, for example, they may not be returning for immunizations (measles!) or to continue treatment for TB–ed]

Farah said that in Somalia, where medical treatment is often free and appointments don’t exist, most only go to hospitals or clinics as a last resort, after home remedies, spiritual practices and all other options have been exhausted.

Does no one have the fortitude to tell them they are in America now! And, just imagine for a moment that you were dropped off in Somalia, do you think for one minute that you would be allowed to continue your “spiritual” practices expecting Somalis to bend over backwards to satisfy your American cultural and religious needs? LOL! Can you see it now, some Somali (or even Kenyan) city employees calling in experts on America to tell the locals how to treat you!

When they disappear we have to “understand where these things come from:”

Farah said while Somalis celebrate the arrival of newborns, many also practice keeping the baby and mother in the home for the first 40 days.

“So it’s a little hard when you tell them, ‘come to the WIC program and we’ll register you, or come to the hospital and there’s a two week check-up on the baby,'” Farah said in reference to the USDA program that offers low-income women, infant and young children nutrition and health education and assistance. “When we are visiting with Somali moms, and then they’re disappearing and we can’t find them until they come back some time, well, we have to understand where these things are coming from.”

Americans are here to “serve” the Somalis. It is called dhimmitude —get used to that word!

On top of navigating a new society and system, many rituals and cultural norms are important to members of the Somali community. Social workers, case managers and others in the health and service industries should be informed of such rituals and norms if they’re to serve their clients competently.

For example, Farah reminded the group that most Somalis are Sunni Muslims, who are prohibited from eating pork and other pig products. What’s more, many only shake hands with others of the same gender.

Yes, indeed we must learn to serve the Somalis. (Anne Richard would surely tell you so as she gets ready to admit many more to the US for her gang of globalist industries looking for laborers and Democratic Party voters.)

* Until I looked just now I hadn’t realized that I have written many posts on Finney County, KS where we are told whites of European descent are now in the minority.

Reporter Brian Mosely:

I never imagined three and a half years ago that simply telling a story honestly could lead to being demonized on national television, in a film sponsored by our own government, no less.

[….]

It’s as if someone made a film about Japanese interment during World War II and left out the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Those comments are from reporter Mosely (whose words and deeds were twisted for the film) from the Shelbyville Times-Gazette yesterday in advance of this week’s debut of a Leftwing propaganda film (Welcome to Shelbyville) to be released widely throughout the US with the help of the US State Department. The reporter and the newspaper are attempting to fight back against monstrous lies perpetrated by the federal government and George Soros sponsored film makers.

RRW Editor: We have followed the making of this propaganda film from the first arrival of the team in Tennessee (led by Kim Snyder) and have posted many times on it. Please return for a moment to read this postin January with background information and links to earlier posts.

It is very important that after you learn the truth about the film that you send the Times-Gazette link to your local reporters and to everyone you know who might see the film. I was told by a reader last night that it will be shown in Emporia, KS this week which long-time readers know was a town embroiled in the Tyson’s /Somali issue in 2007 as well (we have a whole category here at RRW about Emporia). In that city, Tyson’s pulled the plug on the controversial meat packing plant and moved Somalis from the town clearly in response to the upheaval in that city.

It has been my contention from the early days of RRW that the US State Department and its federal refugee contractors are working to supply cheap immigrant labor to the meatpacking industry, as well as to import third worlders to change the political landscape of middle America. They hide behind the cover of a “humanitarian” agenda.

The film’s purpose is to smear Shelbyville as a racist town and shame any other town into silence that might have a problem with third worlders, especially Muslims, flooding their communities.

Know that the US State Department will be promoting this film in a conference call to reporters on Tuesday.

It is so awful (and so scary) to see the lengths our own government will go to to promote lies, and a political/crony agenda.

As many of our readers are aware, in late 2007, I wrote a five part series about the impact that the introduction of Somali refugees were having on Bedford County. The stories focused on how the refugees got here, their traditions and beliefs, and took an honest look at the many cultural clashes that were taking place between the locals and the newcomers.

The series provoked a huge controversy, along with much discussion and debate from members of our community.

Then, in August 2008, the Times-Gazette reported that a new union contract at the Shelbyville Tyson Foods facility replaced Labor Day as a paid holiday with the Muslim festival of Eid al-Fitr.

That story put Shelbyville on the national stage, with the topic touching off coverage from the national news media, as well as massive attention on the issue from talk radio hosts, websites and blogs, some of which continues to this very day.

The controversy the stories created led a documentary crew to Shelbyville in late 2008 to shoot “Welcome to Shelbyville,” which will air nationwide, May 24 on PBS at 9 p.m.. The film received financing from progressive migration advocates, and has been sponsored by the state department as overseas propaganda. The “propaganda” label comes from no less an authority than the New York Times.

I viewed the film twice in October of last year during its local premiere, and found the filmmaker’s depiction of myself and the stories published by the T-G to be a monstrous distortion, with an incredible series of blatant omissions and dishonest misrepresentations that was obviously designed only to advance the political agenda of the filmmakers and the progressive organizations that funded and supported its production.

While the filmmakers certainly have a right to express their views, in the process, I feel they have engaged in a completely unfair character assassination of both myself, the Times-Gazette, not to mention how the entire city of Shelbyville is depicted.

I was planning to give readers more excerpts, but I want you to go to the original story and read the whole thing (with links)—it is so shocking! And, as I said in January, someone should write a book about this—about the making of Marxist/Socialist propaganda in the modern day.

PLEASE FORWARD THE TIMES-GAZETTE STORY TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW! SEND IT TO YOUR LEGISLATORS AND TO EDITORS AND REPORTERS EVERYWHERE!

New readers, go hereto learn how many Somali refugees have been admitted to the US by the State Department over the last 20 years. Guess they are now trying to cover their you-know-whats with this attack on a Bible-belt town.

***Update:Fighting the smears on their town! See the editorial today also in the Times-Gazette (casting a shadow on Shelbyville), here.

***Update # 2: I missed this on Friday! Jerry Gordon writing at New English Review exposed the power and funding behind the propaganda film, here.

I really didn’t need more confirmation, but Allahsoldier commenting at my earlier post, said that he couldn’t wait for another story on Somalis. I said I could find and post another pronto. It took me all of about 5 minutes from answering Allah… to get this post started! And, what a coincidence it’s about Somalis in Kansas as was my post this morning.

A report from Kansas State University about the work of, Laszlo Kulcsar, a sociolgy professor working on immigrant integration:*

“I started out looking at how predominantly white communities, even with some historical diversity, embraced new immigrant workers,” Kulcsar said. “This is a big deal in Kansas because there really isn’t a universal practice for that. What was found was that there is no good model, just more questions.”

Along with Albert Iaroi, K-State doctoral student in sociology from Romania, Kulcsar also looked at Emporia, a city away from the meatpacking triangle in southwest Kansas but also with a large concentration of minority workers.

“Emporia has a well-established Hispanic community already because they came to work on the railroad 100 years ago,” Kulcsar said. “In 2006, though, Tyson brought about 700 Somalis to Emporia to work at its meatpacking plant.”

With the Somalis came a new culture and religion, vastly different from that of the Hispanics, the dominant minority at the time.

Despite the fact that all the Somali workers carried legal work permits, researchers found many in the community rejected these new workers because of their outsider culture. At the same time they began to view the Mexicans as regular, hardworking people.

“It started to become ‘good immigrants’ versus ‘bad immigrants’ based on visible things like skin color, dress and religious practices,” Kulcsar said. “Somalis are black; they are Muslim. The Mexicans, even though they have a different culture and language, are still Christians.”

There was also the difference in customs, Kulcsar said. The Somalis traveled in large groups, a customary practice in their country due to safety. Although women hold positions of authority in Emporia, the Somali workers often did not obey them since only men in Somalia are authority figures.

“Nobody told the Somalis you don’t do these things in America, and nobody told the local government about their customs and religion in advance, so nobody told the community members. The question became, ‘whose job is it to educate the refugees and community,'” Kulcsar said. “This was a troubling finding because these larger actors — corporations and nongovernmental charity organizations playing an important part in the settlement of the Somalis — failed to communicate with the city government.”

As community members in Emporia questioned the city’s role in this process, they found they were given no advance information about it, Kulcsar said.

Here it is, big meat packers helped by outside organizations!

This below can only refer to federal contractors like the Leftwing do-gooders at Catholic Charities, Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services, and Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society among others.

“Immigrants are not showing up for work in a random fashion; in many cases national organizations are working with large corporations to bring these people here for jobs,” Kulcsar said.

For new readers we followed the whole controversy almost from start to finish a couple of years ago in Emporia, KS and have a whole category on it here.

* Reader Khadra, commenting on another Somali “village” in Kansas tells us Somalis have no intention of integrating, assimilating, or whatever we want to call it, here.

If you are a longtime reader of RRW, you will remember how Emporia, KS struggled with a flood of Somali refugees who came to town for jobs at the local Tyson’s meatpacking plant. Fort Morgan, CO, take note.

In an effort to do good by all the refugees who had no education and didn’t speak English, a program was set up at the local community college to give free classes to help them advance their education. Then Tyson’s pulled the plug on the plant and moved its Somali (mostly illegal as we learned yesterday) workforce to another unsuspecting town. The taxpayers are left holding the bag for this program as well as an expansion of the local health department. I bet they had also hired extra ESL teachers for the public elementary and high schools.

One response the program had was to develop a pre-GED Adult Beginning Education class. “We knew that they were going to leave us, but we wanted them to leave us with very specific, transferable job skills,” Ortiz [Kelsey Ortiz the programs director] said. “We actually have two new computer labs that are up and running” for the office skills emphasis of the program. “… The whole idea is, we want you to leave knowing that you’re a lifelong learner and that you have skills that you can use in whatever you want to use.”

According to grant projections, the program is trying to enroll 320 participants for Fiscal Year 2009, with 221 of them advancing one educational level within one year of study. In FY 2008 there were 106 students, “and right now we’re down to about 76,” Ortiz said, a drop of 29 percent. “Some of that is just that we’re in a rebuilding phase over the last two years because of what’s happened” with the Somali workers who left after the Tyson closing. According to Ortiz, the program lost 70 to 100 Somali students.

I have a reform idea. How about all these meatpackers and other big businesses that are bringing in cheap foreign labor be required to educate them right at the facility at the companies expense.

Here is a story we wrote about back in April. It seems that this Kansas city has one problem after another with immigrants. First, Emporia had to deal with a roiled citizenry over Tyson’s Food hauling Somali refugees to the city and then closing the plant. (See our whole category on Emporia here). And, now it turns out that imported Filipino workers were hired illegally for a construction project in the same city.

Although the Filipino ruckus did not involve refugees, it just demonstrates again points we have made recently about the public making no distinction between legal refugees and other immigrants (legal and illegal) when they see the connection to foreign worker hiring practices that allow companies to avoid paying for American workers.

The subcontractor that supplied unauthorized foreign workers for the construction of the Emporia Energy Center apologized to Sen. Jim Barnett and citizens of Emporia in a letter sent to Barnett late last week.

Integrated Service Company, a Tulsa, Okla.-based company also known as InServ, said “an unintentional error” was responsible for the employment of Filipino welders and pipefitters during the construction of the Westar Energy peaking plant. The Filipinos were in the United States on H-2B work visas, which allow them to fill jobs for which there are an insufficient number of American workers.

In order to properly certify the workers for the Westar project, InServ would have needed to notify the Kansas Department of Commerce, which is federally required to verify that not enough American workers are available to fill the jobs. That notification never took place. InServ was a subcontractor for Overland Contracting, a subsidiary of Black & Veatch, which contracted with Westar for the plant construction.

And, now here is the good part!

Rep. Candy Ruff, D-Leavenworth, began an inquiry into the Westar worker situation in March and had been exploring whether federal action can be taken against InServ, Black & Veatch or Westar. Ruff, who is completing her last term in the Kansas Legislature, said that when companies like InServ are exposed for illegal hiring practices, they go to great lengths to cover their tracks.

“Now, do I trust those bastards? Not in a New York minute do I trust ’em,” Ruff said before being sent a copy of Donaldson’s letter. “Because I think that, although they’ve gotten kind of their (expletive) in a ringer right now with the kind of things that they have been exposed to having been done, same (expletive), different day — they just got caught in Kansas. …

“This is all about making money off cheap labor, and I don’t think that’s gonna stop anytime soon. I really don’t.”

Barnett said the immigration laws that require businesses to employ legal workers should have teeth.

“If laws have been broken, then, like everyone else, there should be appropriate consequences,” he said.

Thanks to reader ‘Bill’ who has set me straight and it’s not Richmond, it’s Roanoke!

What a coincidence that this story should pop up the day after we reported the conflicts on-going in RichmondRoanoke between Somali refugees and local black American citizens. This story is from Finland.

A Finnish family complained that an immigrant family in the apartment below them was playing music too loud. The immigrants denied the accusation: they said that as devout Muslims they do not even listen to music.

The Finnish mother had tried to approach the immigrant family to discuss about the noise, but the approach was perceived as a racist attack.

In Finland they think they have the problem solved with mediation.

The conflict concerning noise, which was mediated by Mohamed, was resolved when it was noted that the sound insulation in the building was inadequate, and should be upgraded in connection with an upcoming refurbishment. It also came out that the sound that the upstairs neighbours had heard was from the reading of the Koran.

Blame the building owners and, oh, it was only the Koran reading that was making so much noise. So, it looks like everyone is happy, make the landlord put money into the building and let the loud Koran reading proceeed.

Finnish Refugee Council coordinator Terhi Joensuu says that the disputes have often been connected with the use of common facilities, such as saunas and laundry rooms, children in the playground, and annoyance caused by differing customs.

Yes, that is what we heard in Richmond Roanoke too, common room problems and kids playing (I wonder if spitting is going on in Finland too as it did in Emporia and now Richmond Roanoke?)

In the Helsinki region, in Turku, and the Tampere area, most of the dozens of disputes in which mediation has been applied, has led to a positive result. “We have had good experiences”, Joensuu emphasises.

Mohamed says that many of the conflicts result from the fact that immigrants do not know the rules of living in Finland. It might be unclear for some of them what the requirement of silence in the evening really means, and how waste should be sorted for recycling.

“Finns assume that once information has been posted about rules, they will be known, but for Somalis, for instance, an oral message is more valuable than a written one”, Mohamed observes.

Didn’t I see that in Shelbyville there was an attempt to discuss the problems in an apartment building verbally? And, in this story the Finnish mother did try to talk to her neighbors but was called a racist.

Immigrants often accuse Finns of racism. “It can be true, but can also come from a misunderstanding”, Mohamed points out.

Richmond Roanoke had nothing to do with racism.

In many cases cultural differences have nothing to do with the problem. People are simply individuals, and those coming from the same background can have completely different interpretations of their own culture. Neighbourhood mediators have also arbitrated in a number of disputes between native-born Finns.

Cultural factors could be one reason why Somalis, for instance, are often eager to take part in a mediation effort. Mohamed says that similar methods of conflict resolution are the tradition in Somalia.

“Mediation is something that Finns should learn from immigrants.”

I guess mediation means the Finns have to change their culture to fit the immigrants.

If you are a regular reader of RRW, this is a quiz. What is the common thread in these stories and who do you think needs to do the changing?

Emporia, KS was embroiled in the Somali refugee issue for months (see our whole category here), now comes news that workers brought in to do welding and other work on the construction of an energy plant may have been here illegally. One hundred Filipino workers have headed who knows where, to a town near you maybe, after the whistle was blown. Hat tip: Bluelitespecial.

I guess some cities just can’t get a break!

This brings to mind a point I’ll make in the next post too. I cringe now when I hear people say, I’m fine with legal immigration it’s the illegal that I have a problem with. Bottomline, all immigration needs to be reformed in the United States. Ostensibly these workers were here legally, until someone thought to check it out. If we have a shortage of welders in the US, why aren’t we making a push to get more young people into welding and pay them well?